


Stillness on the Other Side

by emrisemrisemris



Series: On Other Fields [2]
Category: Assassin's Creed - All Media Types
Genre: Angst, Extra Scene, Fix-It of Sorts, M/M, a night to remember, a way through, basically the arc ends way too abruptly and it shouldn't, discussion of assorted terrible parents, discussion of suicide
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-12
Updated: 2020-01-12
Packaged: 2021-02-27 05:00:24
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,541
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22231435
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/emrisemrisemris/pseuds/emrisemrisemris
Summary: And before that, not seven days ago, Alexios had knelt at the altar of Aphrodite to beg for Her grace: for Thaletas to come through the war, for whatever fragile flame had been lit between them not to be quenched in blood. True to the way to the gods, She had given him exactly what he asked for, and not an iota more or less.He'd seen something shatter behind Thaletas' eyes when he'd told the Spartan about Kyra. Had left him alone to drink, as he'd demanded. Was that it? Was he supposed now to put to sea, turn the prow of the Adrestia west, and leave Thaletas alone with his broken pieces?
Relationships: Alexios/Thaletas (Assassin's Creed)
Series: On Other Fields [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1600291
Comments: 5
Kudos: 93





	Stillness on the Other Side

Mykonos celebrated the fall of Podarkes.

There were torches on every street corner, music and dancing in the streets, but all of it had an edge to it, a brittleness that showed in glances over shoulders and conversations that fell silent when other revellers came too close. The city waited, precariously balanced: free of one ruler, not wholly reconciled to another, for all the Spartan forces had removed what remained of the tyrant's regime after the battle with their usual steely efficiency. Even as the citizens caroused late into the night, as Alexios worked with the rest of the crew to get the _Adrestia_ loaded in time for the morning tide there were Spartan guards on the docks, watching. 

Too much had happened too close together. He'd gone from the assassination of Podarkes to a pitched battle to a celebrating city ... and then to Thaletas on the beach, begging him to come home to Sparta; to the nightmare of Kyra on the clifftop. 

And before that, not seven days ago, Alexios had knelt at the altar of Aphrodite to beg for Her grace: for Thaletas to come through the war, for whatever fragile flame had been lit between them not to be quenched in blood. True to the way to the gods, She had given him exactly what he asked for, and not an iota more or less.

He'd seen something shatter behind Thaletas' eyes when he'd told the Spartan about Kyra. Had left him alone to drink, as he'd demanded. Was that it? Was he supposed now to put to sea, turn the prow of the _Adrestia_ west, and leave Thaletas alone with his broken pieces?

Surely not, and yet whatever Thaletas might be thinking, the Spartan was a general now, and in the midst of being fêted by his comrades. He couldn't, wouldn't, slip away into the night. If there was anything to say that might begin to bridge the rift - if there was anything to be said between them now at all - it would have to be Alexios who broke.

There were crates to haul and ropes to wind: hard, monotonous, close-quarters work. Alexios put his back into it with grim determination in the hope that plain exhaustion would drown out the memory of the horror-grief on Thaletas' face and in his voice, and let him sleep. It was not so much late into the night as early in the morning, _Adrestia_ sitting low in the dark water as her hold creaked with new supplies, when he could no longer pretend that he hadn't already made up his mind.

He made some excuse to the handful of crew still awake, and slid over the side without a sound. The torches lining the streets made the darkness around them perversely deeper, ruining the night vision of anyone who looked at them, and Alexios was just another shadow among shadows.

With Podarkes and his guard dead, the Spartan command had taken possession of his villa, and installed a new governor in his place. There were makeshift red banners at the gates already. Soon, some of the army would leave, and those who stayed behind would spread out across the island to survey the damage. But for tonight, at least, the generals would be there, most likely drinking their way through Podarkes' cellar while their staff officers went through his records. There would be bustle: soldiers, servants, _hetairai,_ local dignitaries keen to impress their loyalty on the new administration early.

It wasn't that he couldn't walk in as Alexios the Eagle Bearer. Herodianos, who had commanded at the battle, would vouch for him; for all the Spartan suspicion of mercenaries, he had earned enough credit with them here at least to celebrate with them. But they would _want_ to celebrate with him, and he could think of nothing he wanted to do less. 

Not far from Podarkes' residence, Alexios found a bush set back into a crevice in the rock, and more out of reflex than need sheltered behind it whilst stripping off his gear. He left his weapons and armour there, and kept only the spear, pulling his fraying cloak down over the back sheath to conceal it. It'd still be glaringly obvious, up close, that he was armed, but in torchlight, from a distance, to a drunk or distracted observer it might conceivably pass unnoticed.

He'd been right about the villa. There were guards on the door, but soldiers and civilians passed freely between them, and there was the sound of music and the ripple of voices from within. Inside, in the sliver of courtyard he could see, there were people sitting on the stairs and on the plant pots and garden sculptures as well as benches. They'd been at it for hours by now, but supposedly drinking was the only thing Spartans loved more than fighting, and they had weeks of the latter to make up for. 

There was a caw from above, and Alexios looked up to see Ikaros landing on the vine-covered pergola over the near roof terrace, his shape just visible in the torchlight, before he took off again into the dark. Alexios nodded to himself, took a moment to dust his hands, and then went up the side of the building in one long scramble, secure that the festivities would cover for any noise he was making. He pulled himself silently over the waist-high wall that edged the roof, and stopped, heart in his throat, abruptly unsure of what to do or say or whether to say anything.

Thaletas was alone on the roof terrace, his back to Alexios, leaning against a table and drinking as he looked out over the harbour. His shield, or someone's shield, was propped against the wall in front of him. His braid was just starting to slip. 

Alexios wanted nothing more than to cross the rooftop and take the Spartan in his arms; to press his face into Thaletas' shoulder and feel his warmth again. Two strides would be enough. If he'd been here to kill the man, rather than ... whatever it was he was trying to do, it would have been over already. Instead he hung back, voice seemingly lost inside, trying to find as much as a syllable and failing.

Thaletas set down his wine-cup on the wall in front of him, the soft click of clay on clay somehow audible even with the noise of the celebration floating up from below. Then his hands went to his belt, and before Alexios could react the Spartan was moving, turning and drawing his sword all in one elongated movement. The point of the blade stopped an inch short of Alexios' throat.

The reflection, of course. He'd caught Alexios' reflection in the shield, like Perseus hunting Medusa.

At arm's length, in the orange torchlight, Thaletas looked like Alexios felt: haggard and spent. His knuckles on the hilt were bruised, blood glinting on a cut that could not be old; had he punched a wall? But his stance and the line of his arm as he kept the sword steady were drill-correct, and he sounded deadly sober as he ground out "Why are you here?"

Alexios had weighed a thousand things to say. _I didn't want to leave you to drink alone. I didn't want to leave you with your pain. I didn't want that to be the last thing you ever said to me._ Now, with Thaletas' patience visibly bleeding away before him like sand in an hourglass, he abandoned all of them for the abject truth. "I wanted to see you one more time." Took a breath. "If that's not what you want, say so, and I'll go, and I swear by all the gods you'll never have to see me again."

The hourglass ran down. For a long moment everything was still, the sounds of the festivities around them impossibly muted and distant. There might have been nothing in the world at all except Alexios and Thaletas and Thaletas' sword.

Alexios remembered a nameless battlefield by a rain-whipped sea, and the precise sound of a sword going through a human throat; his wrists ached with the remembered shock of blade on bone. It was a poor choice in close mêlée, because of the time and strain in freeing the weapon afterward when it inevitably hung up on the spine, but brutally effective. Quick.

Without moving the sword, Thaletas said at last "Tell me what happened to Kyra. The truth."

"She went up to the cliff to burn Podarkes' body." Alexios could almost see it again: the painstakingly built pyre and the tyrant's corpse, his robes of office stiff with blood. "I met her there, with coins for the ferryman. We watched him burn. She talked of the - emptiness she felt. She'd pursued vengeance for so long."

The furnace-heat of a bonfire no more than a few yards away. The stench of burning flesh. The trail of moonlight on the bay. The edge.

"I tried to comfort her. I don't remember what I said. I wish I did." He remembered that every word had felt painful and exposed, as he tried to offer what help he could, tried to commiserate without smothering her fresh grief in his old one. Every word of it had vanished from memory, as if it had been written in sand and scoured clean by the tide. "Then - it was as if she'd seen something, out there in the air over the water, and she walked towards it. I tried to stop her. I ... couldn't."

Smoke had stung his eyes, the wind whipping Kyra's voice almost away. He'd grabbed for her arm to find she was just barely out of his reach, and realised that the only way now would be to go over the cliff with her and hope to break her fall; known in the same instant that he could not do it. 

_Not_ known, briefly, whether the pale expanse below that glowed so brightly in the moonlight was white island sand or the snows of Taygetos.

"Swear you didn't kill her," Thaletas demanded.

"What? No!" Alexios stared at Thaletas in horror; the general stared back.

"Give me your word as a Spartan," Thaletas said steadily. Still the point of the sword was a cold presence at Alexios' throat, making his skin itch even with an inch of air between flesh and metal. "Or whatever it is you hold sacred."

"I swear on my mother's life and the spear of my grandfather. For gods' sake, Thaletas, she was my friend too!"

For once he hadn’t meant to raise his voice, but the words had other plans, and then finally, finally, Thaletas lowered the sword. 

He shoved it back into its sheath, metal singing on metal, and folded his hands stiffly behind his back, shifting into something like parade rest. "I ... am sorry. I should have known you were better than that."

"Yes," Alexios snapped. "What in Hades put that into your head?" 

"Not two hours ago," Thaletas said, enunciating every word with the care of a man holding onto his temper by his fingernails, "Bakhides congratulated me on my foresight in having my pet _misthios_ get rid of Kyra.Congratulated me!" He spat the words, fists clenching and unclenching reflexively. "Herodianos pulled me away before I drew on him. I should have done it."

"The night is young," Alexios said grimly.

"Don't tempt me," Thaletas snarled.

Alexios folded his arms, and enquired quietly "Who _is_ Bakhides, exactly?"

"The _strategos_ who will be the new governor. He's a favourite of King Pausanias and an experienced leader. But he doesn't know the - history." Thaletas covered his face with both hands, visibly livid at the memory, and dragged his fingers down in frustration. "Herodianos is briefing him. This wasn't his victory! Kyra fought this fucking war for years. All we did was finish it."

"I could -" Alexios began, considered possible phrasings, and went with "- talk to him about it."

"Please don't," Thaletas said tightly. Then, abruptly: "Kyra's body. What happened to it?"

"I carried her back up to the pyre. Podarkes didn't deserve a hero's funeral," Alexios said, venomously. "She did."

"He will have to answer for her blood as well in Hades," Thaletas said. "You know she was his daughter?"

Alexios nodded. 

"We found some other fragments in his records. I'd hoped to find the opposite, to be able to tell her it wasn't true, that the doll you found was part of some other plot." Thaletas reached for his wine cup again, and looked down into it, as if there would be an omen there. "He never as much as acknowledged her, but he kept a toy she made him for what, fifteen years? Why?"

"Easier to keep a doll on his household shrine than to care about a child," Alexios said bleakly. "Be grateful that your own father was a good man."

"I am. More now than ever." Thaletas went to drink, then paused, cup halfway to his lips. "You - don't sound like you were only talking about Kyra."

Alexios grimaced. "If we're going to talk about _my_ father, I need a drink."

"After our little sparring match -" Thaletas' eyes had taken on a little, just a little, of their old light "- I did promise to drink and listen to your terrible secrets. Sit down?"

There was no bench up here; Thaletas had been standing. Alexios folded himself down onto the haphazard pile of rugs and cushions, and groaned as his joints protested. "I warn you, I have more of them than anyone should have to listen to."

"All the more reason to share them." Thaletas had found an amphora under the table, and now laid it against the wall next to where Alexios sat. He'd filled the cup he'd been drinking from, sat, and held it out. "But first. To Kyra."

"To Kyra," Alexios echoed, and drained it. It was rough but strong, and stung on its way down. 

He set down the cup, and found Thaletas looking at him. The Spartan general looked utterly drained, as if only the simmering fury had been keeping him upright.

Alexios sighed, and said "So, where do you want me to start?"

"Anywhere," Thaletas said. "We've been on this miserable island for months, Alexios, and all I know is you fight like a demigod and fuck like one as well. A soldier should know more about his brothers."

"I'm not a soldier," Alexios said flatly. 

"Start there, then," Thaletas said, unfazed by the edge in his voice. "You trained in Sparta at least a little; it shows in your swordplay. So why are you a _misthios,_ and not in the Spartan army where I could have met you ten years ago?" 

They were affectionate words, meant lightly, and they cut like glass.

"My father was a general," Alexios started, staring dully ahead. Sometimes telling the tale felt like a fresh wound. Now, with wine and exhaustion fuzzing the edges of his mind, he felt only distant and numb, the ache so old he'd forgotten what it meant to be without it. "A loyal soldier. And so when an oracle came from Delphi saying that the price of Sparta's victory was the sacrifice of his daughter - my sister - he let it happen. I couldn't stop them."

He heard the echoes in his own words, like a theatrical chorus reprising a refrain. 

"You were just a child," Thaletas said. "What could you possibly have done?" 

"I was nine. Old enough for the _agoge._ My father thought I was old enough to learn about sacrifice, too. I learned," Alexios said venomously. "I learned it's never the people demanding the sacrifices who offer to make them." The spark of fury had died as quickly as it lit, and he shook his head and stared down. One of the rugs was fraying, a single thread unravelling and leaving a fringe of broken pattern behind it. "I tried to - I don't even know what I was trying to do. I shoved the elder who was holding my sister off the cliff. She fell too. Then ..." Alexios exhaled, still staring at the fraying thread, and concluded bitterly "Then my father threw me after her, because the punishment for killing a priest is death. But I lived." He shrugged. "A travelling merchant found me. His criminal friends taught me to use a sword. And here I am."

"I've known twenty-year veterans who'd think twice if an elder raised his voice," Thaletas said wonderingly. "But you - you were ready to fight to protect your family, to kill, at _nine years old?_ Your father should have been thanking Hera on his knees for a child with so much steel."

Alexios looked up, and found Thaletas' eyes alight with anger. He'd witnessed the Spartan's temper flaring up any number of times, and been on the receiving end of it more than once; by now he could tell the difference between a stray spark that would die with a little time, and one that left unchecked would grow to burn things down. 

This, this cold controlled contempt, was the real thing.

"I have spent twenty years hating everything Sparta stands for, because it made my father into the man he was," Alexios whispered, voice cracking. "And now I find that it forges men like you as well."

Thaletas looked away.

"I'm not Atlas, Alexios," he said at last. "I can't hold up a whole nation for you. But -" he turned back, face tight, lined "- I hope you'll remember me, next time you choose who to serve."

"I work for pay. I don't _serve_ anyone," Alexios said. He remembered, abruptly, the fierce grip of Thaleta's hands on his hips, and more than that, the iron in his voice, and felt a rush of blood to his prick. He kept his eyes on Thaletas', and added "Except you. If you still want me."

Thaletas stared at him for a moment, and then kissed him. 

His hands came up into Alexios' hair, holding him close as if afraid he'd slip away. He tasted of sweet wine, smelled of smoke from the thousand torches that had lit up Mykonos city tonight. The shock of him flooded Alexios like air after a long dive, as if he'd surfaced with his lungs already cracking from lack of breath; like the sun.

"I want you beyond reason," Thaletas said at last, fingers still tight in Alexios' hair, still close enough his breath was warm. "You undo me. If it was up to me I'd spend every day of my life beside you and every night making you scream."

"I can't come back to Sparta with you," Alexios whispered.

"I know. You told me." Thaletas let go, finally, sitting back. He shook his head, eyes still alight, voice raw as he said "All through this fucking campaign I prayed to Apollo Amyklaios for two things: for victory, and the chance to go _home._ I have them both. And now the price of victory is Kyra dead, and the price of going home is losing you."

Sparta, so it was said by learned men of other nations, had built its army on two impossibilities, training its soldiers first to fight to the very border of what was winnable or survivable, and second, not to flinch from what was left when victory and survival were no longer options. Alexios saw as if in a dream the familiar outlines of it all: Thaletas so certain that Sparta required of him a broken heart, that he had picked it up ready to shatter it himself, and had not looked to right or left for another way.

"No," Alexios said, and saw Thaletas' attention, fallen inward, snap back to him like a man waking from sleep.

"What?"

"I said no." Certainty, sudden and total. "The sea may lie between us today, but it won't be forever. You'll fight on other fields, and so will I, and I intend to live long enough to see you again." 

Silence rippled out from around them, and it took a moment for Alexios to realise that silence was almost what it was. The crackle of conversation and the threads of song from the courtyard and the rooms below had finally died away. On the edge of hearing there were night-insects, and under it all, familiar and unthought-of as his heartbeat, the surge and rush and return of the sea.

It felt as if they'd arrived in some stillness on the other side of a storm; bruised, bleeding, but together.

"I would hate," Thaletas said very softly, after some time, "to be the man who heard you say that in anger.”

"There have been a few," Alexios said darkly.

Thaletas shifted, sitting back against the wall and pulling one knee up to his armoured chest. It was the first movement Alexios had seen from him all night that lacked the dreadful tension through his shoulders. "Is that what takes you away, then? Scores to settle?"

"Some. On the side." Alexios said, and Thaletas grinned. "No. I'm looking for my mother. So far as I can piece together, what I did - the omen - shook the kings. If both my parents had disowned me, they might have been reassured. But my _mater_ -" Alexios remembered, suddenly and very vividly, the look on his mother's face in the dark rain, as two of Nikolaos' men held her back: not only piercing horror, but spitting fury - "... didn't. She left my father, left Lakonia, and she made a lot of enemies by it. Powerful ones with long memories; politicians who had been ... relying on Sparta readying for war. The only reason I even know she's alive is because I met someone who wanted her dead."

"I trust it wasn't a long meeting," Thaletas said.

"You would be right."

The Spartan smiled again at that. "The Aegean is wide. Do you know where she might be?"

"I have names of people who might have met her, or helped her, when she ran," Alexios said. "I'll start with them, and follow whatever they can tell me."

"From anyone else I'd say it was impossible to find one woman in all of Greece from so little," Thaletas said ruefully. "From you ... I would believe anything. May Hermes and Poseidon guide you."

"The tide is hours away," Alexios said. "No need to wish me luck just yet."

"Hours," Thaletas echoed, and the familiar beginnings of a smile played around his mouth. "Did you have plans for them?"

Alexios' cock stirred at that, but what interest he could muster withered again swiftly, and he shook his head. "Thaletas, I'm exhausted."

"So am I," Thaletas said. "But I want to touch you, while there's time."

Alexios shook his head in mute amazement, for a moment overwhelmed, and when Thaletas kissed him let himself go backward under the Spartan’s weight, until he was flat on his back amidst the cushions, the sheathed spear a painful bar under his shoulders; he found he couldn’t bring himself to care as Thaletas held him down.

In a breath between kisses, he raised an eyebrow and said "Are you leaving your armour on?"

"While I'd love you to take it off for me again - " Thaletas was already undoing fastenings "- I'd rather spare the time." He shucked off the plates with practised ease, and stacked it neatly next to the wall. Alexios, watching, reflected that _he_ would have let it lie where it fell, and felt a pang of something he couldn't name for how deeply Sparta was in Thaletas' bones.

He worked the belt carrying the spear off over his head and left it in arm's reach, then sank back onto the cushions as Thaletas turned back.

Thaletas' touch now was no less possessive for being gentle, and no less intoxicating. He traced Alexios' scars with callused hands, then reckless kisses, as if he was trying to commit their lines to memory: cheekbone, collarbone, arm, hip, incised deep, like the list of victories on a king's cenotaph. 

It felt as if what little wakefulness he'd had remaining had drained wholly away when he lay down, and the closeness of Thaletas' body and the unfocused upwelling heat it sparked in his own merged hazily into one another and the warmth of the night. Later, Alexios could not remember either of them deciding to leave hold of the other and try to sleep; but at some point they must have given way to it, two bodies together in the warm smoky darkness, drunk on one another, taking what rest they could in the time there was.

*

Alexios woke up to roosters crowing somewhere not far away, and to the familiar bleached-out colours of the hour before dawn. His mouth tasted vile, but his head was clear, though the clarity had a certain fragile quality to it. 

Thaletas was still asleep, curled on his side. One of the shoulders of his tunic had come undone, the pin presumably lost deep under the cushions, exposing the swell of muscle and the angles of his collarbone and shoulderblade. The simple fact of him, warm and irresistible and _here,_ was almost too much to bear.

Another rooster, late and closer by, chose that moment to crow violently, and Thaletas surfaced, rubbing his eyes. He rolled onto his back, a tired smile forming as he caught sight of Alexios. Something about it - the brief flower of unguarded, if exhausted, joy - made Alexios' stomach turn over, not with despair, but hope.

"Welcome back to the land of the living," he said, as Thaletas squinted up at the sky.

"I don't feel like it," Thaletas said. "This headache is straight from the pits of Tartarus. The view, though -" he reached up to touch Alexios' face "- that could be Elysium."

"I never took you for a poet," Alexios said, aware he was grinning like a fool.

"I'm a simple soldier. I say what I see." Thaletas levered himself up to one elbow and kissed Alexios on the cheek. He sat up, grimacing, and finally climbed to his feet and stretched before lifting the pile of his armour up to the tabletop and beginning to put it back on. 

Alexios, armourless, had only to pick himself up and wince at the clicks from his hips and back. He slung the spear back over his shoulders and then leant on the wall and watched Thaletas arm, unwilling to leave quite yet, though the sun crept inexorably higher over the horizon and the tide would be ready for them soon.

"So where will you go?" Thaletas said, after they'd passed a little while in silence.

"Argolis first," Alexios said, and looked out over the sweep of the bay. _Adrestia_ was at the dock, a few tiny figures moving around her. "If that comes to nothing, Korinth. After that ... wherever the trail takes me."

"I hope you find her," Thaletas said, tightening the straps of his bracer. With that done, he was the commander once again, neat and shining, though with dark circles under his eyes. "And if the search ever brings you to Lakonia - come and find me."

Alexios gave him a sidelong look. "Is that an order?"

Thaletas smiled. "If you want."


End file.
